The field of the present disclosure relates generally to wire inspection techniques and, more specifically, to an apparatus and methods that facilitate efficient inspection of a wire segment.
Many modern technological assemblies include electrical wires that must undergo a series of processing steps prior to their installation within the assembly. More specifically, electrical wires are generally delivered in large spools, such that each portion of electrical wire is measured and cut, each end of the cut electrical wire is stripped and inserted into a specific end piece, and each end is crimped to facilitate sufficient electrical contact with a lug, pin, or socket, for example. Several errors may occur during one or more of these processing steps. For example, an insufficient amount of electrically conductive material may be exposed after the stripping step, or stray strands of electrically conductive material may be exposed if an end of the electrical wire is improperly inserted into a lug, pin, or socket. At least some of these electrical wires are visually inspected by a technician to ensure the electrical wire has been properly processed prior to its installation within the assembly. This inspection is a time-consuming and laborious task because the entire area about the processed portions of the electrical wire must be inspected carefully, and there is typically a large number of such wire segments to be inspected.
At least some known wire strip machines and automatic crimp machines have built-in inspection systems. However, these systems generally are able to only perform a single inspection operation (i.e., strip or crimp inspection) on a single type of wire.